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Last time I had a photo of Ray and I together was way back when we first started writting the Bangkok Adrenaline movie script.
That was way back on 24th Sept 2006, when Ray and I got together for our first trial day of scriptwritting.
So here we are again, 21 months later after the successful reception at Cannes of the Bangkok Adrenaline movie and we are both looking towards the future, what will come of this?
Ray And Conan At It Again - How Will This Movie Turn Out?
This photo was last week at a Japanese restaurant in a new upmarket shopping/entertainment complex, as usual my up and down day consisted of the great meeting with Ray and superb Japanese food followed by a night of mild food poisoning and many visits to the loo (toilet).
Just another part of living in Asia.
So back to the real story. Ray has free time and some great offers of help to do a very low budget (even by local standards) movie.
Keeping Production Costs Low
Discussing the options it has been agreed that I will be scriptwriter and star in the movie - that has taken care of two of the more expensive parts of movie making. It also comes out that Ray has offers to do the editing for cost price, free (or very cheap) location use - mountains, jungle, lakes, rivers - and looks like we have got the a movie musician thrown in from another deal too.
Many of the stuntmen will work for deferred or low payment if it does not interfere with ongoing work and a bunch of aspiring foreign actors are willing to put in their efforts to get some screen time too.
Stunt Co-ordinator and Fight Choreographer will be our good friend Ron Smoorenburg
So far so good. After this we went shopping at the local hardware superstore to check out commercially available spotlights to see if we can rig up some cheaper lighting for night shoots.
Cameras (2 hopefully) will be supplied by the Bangkok Adrenaline production company, Motion Pictures, who will also be producing this film. The second camera should be supplied by Eric, a German born stuntman now living in Asia for 12 years. Eric will also act as one of the main characters.
Still we need a cheap QUALITY soundman, the rest of the crew will be paid on normal rate for a total of about 20 days of filming.
Ray said too many low budget movies are crap, they have bad scripts, bad acting, bad lights, and often bad sound. There is no excuse for that, and saying it is because it is low budget is just a cop out, an excuse for a poor quality job.
We plan on shooting on HDV, suitable to transfer to film for cinema showings, but we are aiming at a DVD release. Ray absolutely insists we must have "A" grade sound and lighting and I agree - this gives the movie a feel of quality. Action will be A grade as can be seen from the Bangkok Adrenaline footage - this is something we can do extremely well with our current team.
Genre And Target Audience
Ray wants to do an Action/Horror movie as these are currently the two biggest selling Genres in the world movie market at present.
Personally I have a partly written script already that is Action/Horror but my script as written would require a great deal of special effects make up and a decent 3 minute CGI fight at the end of the movie, plus a tonne of explosives (we could just make our own). The CGI is not doable on the kind of budget we are talking about and neither would the special effects (unless we use real pig guts and real blood - cheap from the markets).
So we need to come up with a suitable story outline (a synopsis) that can fit within the budget.
Ray has an idea that I consider is OK, but I want to make something special, something that may be low budget but stands out from the crowd.
Now I am thinking about either a straight 80's style action movie or possibly an Action movie with a comedic twist, not too dissimilar to Arnold's memorable one liners or possibly go over the top completely and make it a slightly silly Action/Comedy.
I need to work out a believable bad guy and then the rest of the story will fall in place, that is my current stumbling block .
Next thing is the audience, who are we aiming at?
Teenage boys and young men, actually all men, really. Most men like a good shoot 'em up action movie.
But for our purposes we ignore this - our direct audience is the international movie buyers and sales agents - we need to make our movie to sell - that is our goal, for as much as possible.
Our market is to be the International film markets, specifically the German film market, the North American film market and we have contacts for Australia and most of Asia already. Looking at this and looking at our budget and being realistic we are going to do a straight to DVD release, sell it as quickly as possible and start on the next one.
Filming is planned to start November at present, that puts us on a fairly rushed schedule.
One last thing, Ray is going to look for investors at the North American film market in September (I think) and maybe we will get a bigger budget to film, but at the moment we are planning on a shoe string that way we are not relying on anyone else - we alone can make this film so this way it will be done.
I'll keep you updated on developments.
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